The Political Junkie offers an outside-looking- in view of the US. Each day, we will highlight news and opinion pieces from around the world that are focused on US politics and policy. Agree or disagree with the opinions you will read but take a few minutes to see yourselves as others see you.

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Thursday, August 9, 2012

A fictional Obama

Romney and his fictional Obama

Here’s a chance for all who think Obamacare is a socialist Big
Government scheme to put their money where their ideology is: If you
truly hate the Affordable Care Act, you must send back any of those
rebate checks you receive from your insurance companies thanks to the
new law.

This is just common sense. If you think free enterprise should
be liberated from Washington’s interference, what right does Uncle Sam
have to tell the insurers they owe you a better deal? Keeping those
refunds will make you complicit with Leviathan.

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Political commentary these days is obsessed with the triviality of
this campaign. Most of it is rooted in the refusal of conservatives to
be candid about the implications of how their beliefs and commitments
would affect the choices they would have government make — and how they
differ from the president’s.
In Romney’s case, this often
requires him to invent an Obama who exists only in the imagination of
his ad makers. So they take Obama’s statements, clip out relevant
sentences and run ads attacking some strung-together words that have a
limited connection to what the president said. In the welfare ad, Romney
lies outright.